


nothing really touches

by wafflelate



Series: The Many Gardens of Shikabane-hime [2]
Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen
Genre: Action, Dimension Travel, Gen, Second Shinobi War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:33:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23490982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wafflelate/pseuds/wafflelate
Summary: Shikako tries to go home. And tries, and tries, and tries.
Series: The Many Gardens of Shikabane-hime [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1243313
Comments: 24
Kudos: 494
Collections: Heliocentrism — a Dreaming of Sunshine recursive collection





	nothing really touches

_Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world._ ― Gustave Flaubert

* * *

What's worked once works again: Shikako leaves the blank-faced mountain and its empty valley behind and heads for Land of Wind. Gelel's song is a soft whisper, assuring her that there's once again a way out, a way through, a way forward. 

_Home_ , she thinks again. _Home home home_. 

But no matter how reassuring Gelel's song is, no matter how easy travelling feels, the next universe isn't right, either. This time the valley where Konoha should be is a ruin, overlooked by only two of the five faces that should be carved into the mountainside. 

Reasonably provisioned, she intends to stop for nothing and no one, only to falter 48 hours later when her body abruptly remembers how long it's been since she's slept properly. Inside Konoha, Shikako could go for ten to fourteen days without sleep and still function. Outside of Konoha — in a place where _Konoha doesn't even exist_ — Shikako has to force herself to stop, and eat, and then rest. She finds the most defensible camp space she can, traps it to hell and back, and slips into the lightest of mission sleeps. At dawn, she collects every scrap of material she used to make traps and keeps going. 

And going. 

And going. 

In the fourth world, she reappears on top of the altar in the temple in Hot Springs. A priest leans over her, brow wrinkled with concern, and she almost murders him on instinct before she realizes that he's not a Jashinist. Then he tells her the year — ten years too early for her to be home — and she heads for Wind again. The Dead Wastes are just the same as ever, barren and deserted just like they have been the last three times, but this time Shikako doesn't leave immediately. She's tired from her cross-country sprint and her hands shake when she thinks about the temple and its priests. 

She has no idea what she'll find when she next travels, but she's reasonably sure it won't be home, and she's definitely sure that it's going to be Land of Hot Springs again because Gelel can't seem to aim for anything else. She needs to rest before she goes. 

Given the choice between a bare, dusty cave and a less-dusty but still bare temple, Shikako choses the temple. There, the song of Gelel is an intoxicating and deafening lullaby; it drags her into a sleep deeper than she's had since she was passed out on top of that T&I table. 

She dreams about the Garden of Life from Death, and about the terrifying but intoxicating feeling of knitting Kankurō back together as easily as she'd use a jutsu to smooth out a training field after a spar with Sasuke. His body has remembered how it should fit together; fixing his body had been easier even than drawing water up from the ground or coaxing plants to grow. She had been a god, deep and unfathomable. 

When she wakes, Gelel's power is at her fingertips again almost before she picks up the Gelel stone. The song turns into a dance of two beings. Shikako-and-Gelel find it easy to push the temple back into its constituent parts. They find it easy to bring up the water, and the plants, and to turn the memory of birds and mice and other things into flesh and blood. Gelel has a long memory and no concept of time — nor even a concept of space — so it might as well have been yesterday that the Dead Wastes were flourishing and the fifth world might as well be next door. 

Gelel fades. 

Shikako is alone in the temple again. 

In the fifth world, the temple is still situated in the middle of a hidden village, which Shikako figures out when exiting the temple nearly gets her killed by a jōnin and two chūnin wearing old fashioned clothes and armor. None of them are up to Konoha standards and neither is anyone else in the village, so Shikako successfully exfiltrates, but the landscape around the Village Hidden in the Hot Springs is embroiled in what appears to be the Second War. Not good. 

She tries to give the front lines a wide berth, but both sides of the conflict are on high alert even when (or, _especially_ when) there's no active fighting going on and "the front line" seems to be the _entire country_ of Land of Hot Springs and maybe some of Frost, too. Both sides are prone to assuming she's the enemy. It takes her a week to even get within sight of what she thinks of as the Land of Fire border, but of course in this time period that border is just a fuzzy gradient of ground held, surrendered, or bitterly fought over. 

If she tries to cross the border when there are Konoha ninja anywhere near it, someone _will_ notice her. Even if they don't, they may notice signs of her passing and track her down later. The chances of Shikako making it all the way across Land of Fire just with her current skillset are slim and the chances of her then being able to cross into Land of Wind are even slimmer. 

But she already knows that she doesn't want to stay here. She already knows that she's going to leave, so it doesn't matter if people are hunting her long-term. All Shikako _really_ needs to do is keep ahead of any pursuers until she reaches the Dead Wastes, and if she focuses on _that_ goal instead of on avoiding notice altogether... 

She just needs wider sensing. And not even Senju Tobirama-level wider sensing — which is good, because she doesn't have the time or knowledge to train her sensing up to be any better than it is. What she does have is seals and an entire childhood's worth of reading about chakra. 

Even suppressed chakra is more dense than no chakra, more dense than an animal or a civilian. A difference like that can be measured, and anything that can be measured can be useful. 

On one side of a piece of paper she traces a variety of objects from hammerspace to make concentric circles. She labels cardinal directions. She indicates distance. She uses her smallest brush to write the kanji for "self" — 自, a kanji for the rest of the seal to refer to itself when she flips the paper over to make it measure the chakra of everything within two kilometres and display anything above the threshold of an Academy student as a dot of light. 

It's not the most stealthy of seals — it has to send out a small ripple of chakra and measure how it feels when it bounces back, and Shikako only has herself to test against. But it works. Mostly. She doesn't have time to add bells and whistles, like making it glow brighter for someone with more chakra. But she's able to creep forward around patrols and past outposts, keeping the lights that indicate ninja as close to the edge of the seal's concentric circles as possible. 

Shikako travels through the night and then keeps going. 36 hours later, when the sun is going down again, she's well into Fire Country and finally feels like she can afford to lay out traps and sleep. 

She wakes up to an Inuzuka getting caught in one of her traps by the ankle, swinging from a branch three meters above Shikako's campsite. The snap of the trap activating wakes her, and the Inuzuka's quiet swear brings adrenaline thundering through her system, whisking away any grogginess from getting only a few hours of sleep. 

The Inuzuka's dog barks and is almost right on top of her. Shikako's feet react faster than any other part of her: she twists and snaps a leg out and kicks the ninken hard in the side, hard enough to send it careening through the brush. 

Oops. There's not really time to feel bad about it, though— 

"I'll fucking kill you!" screams the young Inuzuka, now sawing through the rope around her ankle. She's wild-haired and fang-mouthed and about Shikako's age. "Kuromaru, get back up!" she shouts as she drops to the ground, half an order and half a plea as she throws herself into a Passing Fang. 

This is Inuzuka Tsume, Shikako realizes, at which point Inuzuka Tsume slams into her. 

Shikako is just practiced enough at having Kiba fling himself at her that she's able to half-dodge the jutsu and roll with Tsume's movement so when she can disengage and scramble to her feet she only comes up with bruises instead of broken bones. 

The bushes rustle — Kuromaru climbing back to his feet — and Tsume has more teammates (probably human ones) coming towards the fight at a sprint. 

Shikako doesn't want to fight Inuzuka Tsume, or kick her dog again, or fight the other Konoha ninja who will soon be here. She leaves the unsprung traps and rumpled sleeping roll behind. 

It's a long, hard run. The new seal is Shikako's only real advantage, allowing Shikako to track Tsume and her team. Tsume must be the head of the squad because instead of rushing to catch up they pursue at an almost languid pace, the kind of sustainable run that Shikako knows they'll be able to keep up consistently until they overtake her. 

_We invented this,_ Kiba had bragged when they had been children and Iruka had introduced the concept of persistence hunting. 

_That's right,_ Iruka had said. _The Inuzuka introduced this technique to the village._

Shikako had hoped they'd turn back to continue some kind of standard patrol, but they don't. Truthfully, the only thing Shikako's seal lets her do is see the fight coming inch by inch as Tsume slowly runs her down and the dots of light representing Tsume's team creep their way further and further towards the center of the seal. 

Setting up traps to slow pursuit alone is hard enough in usual circumstances. These circumstances — in which Shikako is unwilling to set any lethal traps — makes it basically impossible. 

They're going to catch up. 

Shikako stops to rest. There's time to eat an Akimichi-made ration bar and crinkle the familiar wrapper between her fingers as she chews. There's time to sketch a few seals out. There's not quite enough time to finish stretching before Tsume and Kuromaru fling themselves at her in a perfectly executed Fang Over Fang. 

More than ready, because Tsume and her team entered sensing range half an hour ago, Shikako dodges once and then twice. She keeps her distance. She makes sure not to lose focus on either of the two members of Tsume's team who are hanging back nor the member who's circling around to Shikako's other side. 

That one has chakra like thick, fuzzy static. An Aburame, probably. Not good. 

Shikako leads Tsume and Kuromaru up and down several trees, frequently leaping at improbable angles from one tree to the next the way Naruto would. By the time Shikako notices that the first kikaichu has landed on her, she's almost got Tsume and Kuromaru into position. There's no time to even brush the bug off — one more leap and a quick dart around a tree and then Shikako has to take the risk of squeezing her eyes shut and covering her ears as the flashbang tag she planted goes off. It's so bright that, even facing away from it and sheltered by the bulk of a large tree, it still paints the insides of her eyelids. 

She opens her eyes as soon as the light has faded and kills the kikaichu that's landed on her before she peeks around the tree trunk. Tsume and Kuromaru have both tumbled to the ground. They've extracted themselves from the underbrush by the time Shikako is on top of them, but it isn't enough — besides not being able to see or hear, she's disoriented them. Inuzuka can fight with their nose, sure, but she's not going to give them the chance. 

Because a knockout tag could be quickly undone by a teammate Shikako opts for straightforward violence, and Tsume goes down and stays down with just one blow to the head. She's not dead, she's probably not dangerously concussed, and Kuromaru won't stray from her side. They're out of the fight. 

The kikaichu, meanwhile, have crept closer. Some of them travel alone, others in small packs. They've each got tiny little chakra signatures, as small as Kakashi-sensei's when he's suppressing his chakra, but Shikako can track them with a little effort. She can stay away from them long enough to think. And long enough to realize that Tsume and the Aburame's other two teammates heard the flashbang go off and are making a beeline for their location. 

Well, this was never going to be an easy fight. 

If the Aburame hasn't figured out yet that she's a sensor it's not long now, so Shikako cuts to the chase and heads straight for the Aburame. She thickens the chakra of her scent-suppression jutsu until it's enough to keep the kikaichu from doing anything but eating her chakra and pulls out the Sword of the Thunder God. Undoubtedly this mission report that will result from this for Tsume's team is going to end up being a headache and a half for everyone involved, but Shikako doesn't expect it to ever be _her_ problem. 

With the Nidaime's sword in hand, Shikako can spam low-voltage lightning attacks both to zap bugs out of the air and to target the Aburame. She circulates her chakra. She keeps moving. The Aburame slowly pulls their kikaichu back into the relative safety of their body. 

The third teammate is a brown-haired branch Hyūga who's clearly taking advantage of being away from his clan by ditching the typical clan uniform and instead wearing chūnin blues and generously sized kunai pouches. 

Playing tag two against one turns out to suck. The Hyūga is fast, fights dirty, and turns out to be an incredibly proficient shuriken user, stringing them up on wire and directing them around blind corners because the Byakugan is _very_ unfair when you're fighting against it instead of working alongside it. Shikako bounces around the clearing using the replacement jutsu and keeps them at bay with lightning, but it's not sustainable and it won't end the fight. 

This is Shikako's first time being on the other end of Konoha teamwork without a team of her own and she really, really doesn't like it. 

If she hits one of them with enough electricity to take them out...but no. Lightning jutsu are unpredictable and deadly, and Aburame are particularly susceptible to them. In fact, given the way the Caged Bird seal works, the Hyūga probably has an increased risk factor, too. If she wants to get away, she might have to kill one of them. 

She really, really doesn't want to do that. 

The next place she replaces to has a cloud of kikaichu waiting for her. Shikako swirls her chakra away from her body the way she would to shake off dust after she's been thrown to the ground in a spar, sending the bugs — so _many_ bugs! — tumbling away from her, and then she replaces again. She lands in the deep shadow of a tree, hoping she can catch both of them at the same time if she gives herself enough reach, and freezes. 

Her arms slowly lift, out from her body and then up, palms out. They make her drop the Sword of the Thunder God — she makes sure it lands in hammerspace, winking out of existence even as her body turns around without her permission, spiritual chakra gripping her shadow so that it grips her legs so that she moves without her own permission. 

The Nara standing behind her is young. Younger than her, younger than Tsume. Young enough that he should be a genin at most, but he's definitely wearing a chūnin's vest. He's holding his hands above his head, too, mimicking her pose. He has her brother's jawline and her father's nose. He has a shadow deeper than it should be for his age. 

This is a main family Nara, and from the moment she'd landed in his shadow he's known she's probably a Nara... but more importantly this is definitely Nara Ikoma, who she's only ever seen before in pictures. 

Shikako tries to move her arms. They don't move, but she can see the tendons on Ikoma's arms tighten as he strains to hold her. He would be at a disadvantage even if she weren't a Nara; she's older and stronger. He can't hold her for long. 

The Hyūga is closing in quickly, his hands folded for a Jyuuken strike that might kill her. If he touches her this fight is over, and Shikako can't die here or let herself be taken for questioning. She has to go _home_ and no one is going to stand in her way. Not even this uncle she's never met before. 

He's basically a stranger. He doesn't know her. She might never even be born in this universe, and even if she is, Nara Ikoma still probably won't live long enough to see it. He's the enemy right now and he has her trapped — which when you think about it is really too bad for him. 

Shikako turns her shadow back on him like a tsunami, flooding her shadow back through the connection he's created and overtaking him. The feedback drops him like a sack of rocks, sends him to his knees and then does worse, because Shikako has never done this before and Shikako _wants to go home_. Her shadow subsumes him. She feels him slide into the black and then she has to jerk back both to keep from following him and so that she can focus on the Hyūga again. 

The pissed Hyūga, because now two of his teammates are down and he's almost got her within range of his divination. Shikako whips the Sword of the Thunder God back out of hammerspace and comes so close to cutting one of the Hyūga's hands off that his sleeve shreds and his arm goes momentarily limp from the incidental electrical contact. 

Keeping his hand attached to his arm makes him rear back just enough to give Shikako the opening she needs to slip so far into shadow state she loses human form and melts into the general shadow of the forest. It's an incredibly disorienting way to travel. She has to focus on getting farther away from the Konoha team rather than on figuring out where exactly she is. The Hyūga and the Aburame are both well and truly distracted checking up on their teammates. 

Eventually it seems safe to return to flesh and blood and take off towards Wind again. 

She checks the radar seal over and over again on her way to the Dead Wastes, but they never reappear, and the border with what will soon be Land of Rivers isn't as well guarded as Fire's northern border had been. Probably because of the mess everyone's currently making of Land of Rain. 

The temple is right where it should be. Safe and empty, dead except for Gelel's soothing song. Shikako picks the Gelel stone up, but Shikako-and-Gelel don't immediately send her on to the next world. Instead, Shikako-and-Gelel let her lose herself in the by-now familiar routine of drawing water up and up, the strange and reassuring practice of breathing life into the memory of birds, springing plants fully formed with just a thought. Shikako-and-Gelel's bright light stays low and careful, sculpting out a place to rest and nothing else. 

The water is clear and well-shaded by new trees. Shikako empties and refills her canteen and her scrolls of drinking water and then she bathes instead of cleaning with chakra for the first time since she scrubbed down in T&I on that first world. 

She's lucky to be alive and lucky she didn't kill anyone. Her whole body aches with remembered bruises and scrapes that she doesn't have anymore, all of them whisked away by Gelel's power. 

Instead of sleeping and then leaving, Shikako sleeps and then takes the radar seal out. She tears it apart so that she can rebuild it better. More useful — she doesn't have a teammate to keep watch, so she's going to have to make something to fill that gap. Not just a passive way to monitor where other ninja might be, but something that will actually alert her before it's too late. 

It's time to accept that she's got a lot farther to go. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I swear some day I'll finish and post some non-exchange thing for reasons other than to tell you about exchange things, but today isn't that day. If you're interested in making Naruto or DoS fanfiction or fanart, I'm running a general Naruto exchange that allows both and other subfandoms! You can find [rules and everything here](https://exchange-no-jutsu.dreamwidth.org/) as well as a [tumblr to follow](https://exchange-no-jutsu.tumblr.com/) and a [event server](https://discord.gg/Uvav5T2) to join. Nominations are now through April 10th and sign ups are April 11th-18th.
> 
> If you're not really interested in the exchange, you could join my DoS server, [Heliocentric](https://discord.gg/rCtwMQG) instead! But no pressure on either thing. Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you're staying safe and taking care of yourself!


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